


to Babel, in ruins

by captainkilly



Category: Band of Brothers (TV 2001)
Genre: Comfort/Angst, Healing, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War, Speech Disorders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:02:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28055820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainkilly/pseuds/captainkilly
Summary: Chuck knows recovery isn't a linear event. Knows there are times when words will leave him and the night will place him back beneath the dirt. Knows there are things he just can't speak about.Captain Speirs hears him anyway.
Relationships: Charles Grant/Ronald Speirs
Comments: 4
Kudos: 33





	to Babel, in ruins

**Author's Note:**

> _crawl inside this body / find me where I am most ruined / love me there_ ~ Rune Lazuli

* * *

The lake is beautiful at this hour.

Chuck likes to sit and watch the sun turn the sky bright with pinks, purples, and golden hues. Likes to see the water absorb the shades until they mingle with even the darkest blues. Likes the way this feels familiar, with the sun’s rays brushing his face and the trees all around him before the looming dark claims them.

He sits and watches the sunset almost every night now. Believes the lake to be the best place for it, even when the view from the upstairs windows is reportedly the better one. He’s always liked the water more than the open skies. Isn’t sure if this might disqualify him as a paratrooper – Tab had certainly laughed and told him so – but he has won the war and doesn’t think it matters.

He’s won more than one war.

If he is honest with himself, which he sometimes attempts to be, he likes the sunset by the lake better because all pretense falls away. Out here, he’s still himself. In there, with most of the remaining men who haven’t rotated out yet, he’s the guy who got shot during peacetime. He’s the guy who can’t uphold long strings of conversation, not now that his mind displaces words and fragments his speech.

Easy still sees him as Chuck, but there’s not a whole lot of Easy left in these parts.

He’s not surprised to find the exception to the rule approach him now. Hears the creak of the boards on the dock behind him. Hears the light footsteps, the momentary stomp of boot meeting wood, and knows them as well as he knows himself. Senses the proximity of the other person without having to raise his head. If he’s honest with himself, which he always tries to be when it comes to _him_ , he would recognize him blind even after he’d forgotten all else.

“Hello sir,” he says, because there are still ranks to observe despite the fact that there is no chasm of command between them anymore. Is proud of the way his voice does not waver on the s-note the way it often extracts itself from his mouth in that sibilant noise that blurs his words lately. He pauses on what to say next, but is not surprised when his tongue is incapable of working out the whole sentence. “Seat?”

He appreciates how his captain does not ask for clarification. How he’s not forced to explain the absence of certain words, not pushed to wrap his tongue around words that won’t make it to the surface any time soon.

“Chuck.”

There’s just the one acknowledgment of his name, spoken in the same soft voice that keeps anchoring him to this earth, before the man sinks down to the dock’s boards and seats himself beside him. Captain Speirs is not one for words in moments like these, only using many at a time when he is barking orders, and there’s no expectancy of needing to speak at length in his presence.

Chuck is quietly certain of the fact that he can have whole conversations with his captain in nothing but gestures and glances. He isn’t surprised to find the man looking straight at him when he turns his head to face him, nor is he surprised at the way the man’s boots toe the side of his leg. It has been like this since the hospital.

It’s been like this since he broke on a foreign road.

He remembers waking. Remembers there was a scream lodged in his throat that he couldn’t form the sounds around. Remembers choking, helpless, on asking where he was and how much damage his body could take and why everyone was looking at him like he was already dead. Remembers how one of the white-clad people had hurried out the room and returned with Speirs. Returned with the one man who didn’t so much as blink, but put a hand on his ankle and spoke to him in half-sentences that cut through the fog in his mind.

Tab and Lieb had been the ones to piece the rest together. How Speirs had stood between him and death and refused to budge. How the man’s ability to hunt anyone down had delivered a surgeon who hadn’t proclaimed him dead while he was still drawing breath. How his captain had saved his life, first. How he hadn’t taken a life, after. How his hand had trembled and shaken while holding a weapon. How his eyes could have made anyone believe war’s touch was the only kindness the man had ever known.

There’s an almost-formed puzzle in his mind where all the pieces of Speirs used to be.

“Reminds me of home,” he says, then, watching the sun sink into the water. Needs the man to know what comfort is in sitting here. “Sunset like this.”

“Better than home. Quieter.”

“Boston, right?”

“Yes.”

“Going back?” He glances at Speirs again. Watches the golden hues of the sun’s leaving rays dance across the man’s skin before he refocuses on the glistening water. “When you’re done?”

“Maybe.”

“Will you be?” Recklessness claims his tongue more often now. Grasping at words every other sentence means he uses whichever words come to mind. He can’t fathom a universe in which Speirs goes home. “Be done?”

“Not for a while yet.”

“I’d be done.” He knows it. Had decided it before his mind shattered. “I _was_ done.”

He can’t hide anything from Speirs. Can’t hide how things have changed now. How he’s still here and doesn’t want to be anywhere else. How the sunset over this lake feels warmer than anything waiting back in California. How he can’t go home, not yet, not while his head goes fuzzy at the worst moments and he can’t hold on to anything without breaking it.

“War doesn’t let go.”

Chuck doesn’t comment on the ragged breath that is exhaled around his captain’s admission. He knows this is something they don’t talk about. Knows that there are no words, not even in a healthy man’s head, that would describe the empty gaze Speirs can direct at the world. Knows there is no way to describe the cold sweat on his own skin and the ache in his throat he feels upon waking from sleep every time.

He knows they don’t talk about the fact that he wakes to his captain’s hands shaking him awake night after night after night. They don’t spare words for the terror that takes minutes to subside, in which he fights the man with weakened limbs and an even weaker voice. He has never commented on how Speirs just seems to know he’s trying to claw his way out of nightmares, out of the cold ground he should’ve been buried in, out of the dirt that still threatens to swallow him in the dark. He ignores the dark circles underneath the man’s eyes and pretends at least one of them isn’t falling apart.

_War doesn’t let go_ , he thinks, and envisions a world in which war can wrap her limbs around a soldier and set him to drown. Thinks of a world in which the man beside him kneels before her and surrenders to her every demand because it’s the only way he’s been taught how to keep breathing. Chuck knows there is a universe out there, somewhere, in which war wrecks his body and then attempts to glue him back together again. Sometimes, he thinks that universe crashes into this one when his captain’s eyes go strangely bright with the hint of a smile.

“Know what else doesn’t?” _Doesn’t let go_ , he means to say, and he knows Speirs understands him when the man’s head turns and those burning eyes fix on his face. “Memory. I don’t.. I remember Currahee every time on those stairs.” He feebly gestures at their place of residence behind them. At the stairs in the distance, worse to walk on now that his feet don’t always mix with the ground so well, and the steep hill that surrounds them. “Remember the times you used to run with me.”

“The night runs?”

“Yeah.” He smirks. “The ones Sobel kept trying to break me with.” He shakes his head slowly. Is rewarded for the movement with a dull ache drumming itself down from skull to shoulder. “I remember all of those. I don’t remember dinner today, or what Tab told me yesterday.”

“I told Sobel I’d go with you. Made it sound like I wanted to be sure you were properly punished for your defiance.” Amusement, warm and dark, colors Speirs’s voice as the corners of his mouth briefly lift into a smile. There’s a twist on the word _punished_ that sounds vaguely teasing, tainted with the knowledge that the runs had been the furthest thing from that. “He never understood that it strengthened you. Strengthened the men who had to follow, you, too, because they saw you survive him.”

“And survive _you_ ,” Chuck says, pointedly, because even at Toccoa rumors had followed Speirs around like faithful puppies. He keeps his voice so level and dry that he is rewarded with a snort of soft laughter at his new observation. “Think that helped.”

A hum of acknowledgment, low and content, buzzes in the air between them a moment. Chuck smiles when the conversation lapses into silence once more. This, too, is like Currahee. Nights spent pushing himself up that mountain with Speirs’s quiet companionship trailing him all the while. Eventually, the conversations. Halting at first, with something strangely tentative in the man whose eye for tactics made him brash and fearless in every other way, and eventually something to look forward to.

His favorite moments had always been the times Speirs had held a hand out and stalled the run back. The times they’d adopted a leisurely walk back to base, moon as high in the sky above them as it now covers the Austrian lake with a silver sheen, and walked so closely side by side that the hairs on his skin had risen in response to Speirs’s proximity. The nights they’d stretched out as long as they’d dared without being reported as having gone missing. Nights like these, right after sunset, when the world tilts into darkness and he only knows the man beside him by the sound of his breath and the warmth that brushes against his bare skin so surreptitiously he thinks he dreams it every time.

“Relief,” he says, then, because he wants to reclaim the night. Wants to take it back from the jaws of death. Wants to take it out of the clutches of a replacement from Item who’d come closer to taking his life than any enemy ever had. “At Foy, when you were there. Knew we would make it.” He ducks his head. Feels his cheeks burn in response to Speirs’s knuckles coming to rest against his. “Felt like.. like coming down from Currahee. Good.”

“It helped most of you were more terrified of me than you were of dying.”

“Not me,” he laughs.

“No, never you,” his captain agrees warmly, and it shouldn’t feel so good to hear the words but his belly flares into heat all the same at the sound. “I don’t know if anything scares you.”

“Clowns.” He shudders at the thought. “Films with lots of songs. Sheep.”

“Sheep?”

“They’re _evil_ , sir.” He nods carefully. Is relieved when the pain in his head doesn’t worsen. “One of them tried to eat me in Normandy. Lieb pulled it off me.”

“I almost landed on a cow in Normandy. Not sure who would’ve won that fight.”

He isn’t sure if it’s the image of Speirs fighting a cow or how unperturbed his captain sounds, but a laugh startles out of him before he can hold it back. It bubbles forth in his belly, lodges in his chest, and streams out across the lake. He wouldn’t be surprised if this laugh causes ripples in the water with the way it floods out before he can hold it back. Some of the sound travels back to his ears in joyous echo.

“Cows-s are,” he hiccups, speech utterly slipping now that his laughter trembles through the words, “things-s to be s-s-scared of, s-sir.”

Speirs’s answering laugh is so soft that he almost misses it. He chances a look at the man and sees warmth spark to life in his eyes. Watches as tell-tale amusement tugs at his lips and softens the hardened marble lines that sometimes turn his captain’s face into that of a statue. There’s something throaty to the laugh that threatens to knock the breath out of Chuck’s lungs the longer it drags out into the air between them.

Still, Speirs’s smile is quick to fade. There’s something harsh to his features now that the darkness slowly settles over his face. Chuck’s own laughter fades as the shadows move across them both. He shivers moments later as the lake’s air kicks up into a breeze.

“S-sorry. I’m..” He gestures as the language fails him. Moves his hands to the trees and then to the sky. Tries again. “Not like a bird. Not birding. Not.. _damn_.”

“I know you’re not mocking me, Chuck.”

His captain’s voice, soft. His captain’s hand against his own, gentle. He swallows thickly as the kindness of the words settles in his mind. Wants to ask how the man always knows what he means to say, even when his brain plays tricks on him and nothing he speaks of makes a lick of sense. Doesn’t think he has enough English left in his grasp to try.

“End of day,” he says instead. Exhaustion settles in his limbs and sends a painful shiver up from base of spine to the map of scars on his head. His fingers tremble. He’s well past the shame of admitting weakness. “Stairs.”

“Not letting you walk all of those,” is the immediate reply. Fierceness clouds Speirs’s voice. Blazes forth and drives the early night air away from his limbs. “I have a shortcut.”

“You hate those.”

He knows this. Speirs and he ran Currahee together. He knows this.

“I do, but you’re in no state for stairs.”

“Slow.”

“No, not even then.” He knows the snappish tone Speirs takes with him all too well. Has heard it several times, in and out of the hospital, over the past few months. He opens his mouth to argue, but Speirs cuts him off before he can get any syllable out. “I know that’s not what your doctor said. I know you’re supposed to practice movement, speech, anything.”

“So let me.”

“Not tonight.”

“Can do this,” he mumbles. Hates feeling like he can’t, like one wrong move is going to send him tumbling down the steps. Hates admitting he can’t. “If you help.”

Speirs rises to his feet wordlessly in response. Doesn’t hold a hand out the way Tab does when they’ve been for a swim. Doesn’t ask if he’s okay the way Lieb tends to, either, and he’s glad he doesn’t have to explain. His captain’s arms come to rest around and beneath his shoulders. Pull him up until he can find his own feet without stumbling, until his body feels steady on this earth.

Warmth seeps through his uniform and dissipates the ache within his arm at the contact. He leans into the touch before he can help himself. Leans against his captain’s chest a moment, rests his head in the crook of the man’s neck, exhales a shaky breath when he is allowed to exist in this space he knows isn’t offered to anyone else. Pushes away from the contact in the next moment as the pressure around his shoulders fades.

It’s always been like this. A part of him thinks it will always be this way.

When he turns, Speirs is there. When he moves, Speirs is at his back. When he stumbles, as he does, Speirs’s hands close around his arms and stop the fall.

It’s not enough.

It has to be enough.

* * *

Captain Speirs’s shortcut leads him up a path he’s never set foot on. He’s unsure of his feet here, with leaves underfoot and branches riddling the ground, but focuses so entirely on his boots that he knows the risk of falling to be minimal. The air around him grows colder still, even away from the water, now that the trees rise up all around him and grow denser than he’s ever seen them.

These woods are nothing like Bastogne. Death in Austria is out on open roads, in the full light of sun or moon, and doesn’t lurk beyond these trees. He’s not trapped in the woods like so many of the company are. He’s not lost among the trees like his friends are. The woods present a friendlier sight than some of the men still left in Austria these days – Fox Company, he has decided, really _is_ comprised of a bunch of yokels – and there is a comfort in the changing colors that he’s glad he’s alive to witness.

The part of the residence they now step into isn’t any part he knows, even though the knotted branches of the trees right outside are the same he can see from his bedroom window. He thinks his bedroom must be up above his head, surely it has to be, because the gleam of moonlight that streaks through these windows below is the same as the one he sees night after night while lying in bed pretending his world isn’t ending.

It’s a storage space, or close to it. Packed with boxes. Packed with rounds of ammunition, with the heavy scent of gunpowder lingering in the air, and other supplies they haven’t had cause to look at since the war ended everywhere but in their own heads. He supposes all these things must be somewhere until they can move stateside again with what remains of them.

“Sir,” he says, then, spying some things that do not belong with any kind of army supplies he knows, “you can’t be serious.”

“Serious about what, Chuck?”

His captain’s voice is far too light. Far too dismissive for the unspoken question that lingers on Chuck’s tongue, and perhaps it’s this that makes him steel himself for the confrontation. He shakes his head. Gestures at the thin, threadbare mattress and the blankets he has spotted behind a few stacks of boxes.

“Please tell me you’re not _staying_ here,” he demands, pausing before adding rank to his momentary incredulity, “sir.”

“I can’t..” Speirs huffs out a breath. Almost seems to hunch in on himself before he responds in earnest. “I can’t sleep in beds anymore.”

“Okay.”

“I-I.. I drown every night.” There’s a faraway quality to the man’s voice Chuck doesn’t dare identify. Speirs has gone utterly still beside him, like a cat set to pounce atop a mouse, and briefly Chuck wonders if the man thinks fear is killed that way too. “I kept upstairs awake with it. Moved down here when I learned of that.”

Knowledge, heated and insistent, tugs at Chuck’s mind before he can halt its approach. For many nights now, he has lied awake and wondered. Has wandered around his room and ventured out into the hallway beyond in a bid to figure it out. Now, it seems, he has uncovered the whole of the puzzle. He is left to turn the final piece over in his hands. Watching Speirs, now, he decides he wants to see how it fits.

“I think I heard you,” he says. Keeps his voice level. Touches the man’s sleeve with his fingers. Doesn’t apply pressure, not now, not when he’s as scared as Speirs seems to be. “I think I heard you through the walls. I don’t know how.”

He can’t help but laugh when his captain steps toward the wall and pushes it out of the way. Speirs singlehandedly changes the room’s broad wall to reveal a narrow staircase, crudely hewn out of stone, that seems to travel upward to where he is now certain his room is. Night flashes across his memories. There is a door in the wall of his room, too. He’s seen it wide open behind Speirs – can identify it so clearly now that his memory of screaming himself hoarse in his captain’s arms finally blurs and changes – and has seen it close again every time Speirs left him in the morning.

“That’s how you knew,” he says. Laughs, really, because of _course_ it is something as mundane as this that winds up having made his captain look mythic once more. “You heard me through the walls, too. Just like I heard you.”

“I’m sorry,” murmurs Speirs, voice so soft Chuck almost thinks he has misheard, “I never meant to wake you. My nightmares are” – an exhale, noisy and shuddering – “my own.”

“Bullshit, sir.” He may have forgotten the words that allow him to solve crossword puzzles, but he can find the words for this idiocy just fine. “You never once said that to me. Not once.” He shakes his head. Tightens his grasp around his captain’s sleeve now that he means to force a point. “I fought you. I screamed. I cried. I couldn’t.. I couldn’t _look at you_ for a week because I hated how much I _needed_ you.” He designs his words to cut. To claw their way out of his chest and lodge themselves beneath the other man’s skin. Needs to know why he feels so raw, so shaken, so unsteady from just looking at Speirs. “Why don’t you let me help you?”

“I’m your commanding officer.”

“You’re my captain,” he shrugs, “and you keep me from falling apart.” He sighs. Oversteps the line that Speirs just drew for him. Wonders how much of a line it really is when the man leans in to the touch of his hand on his arm. “Let me do this for you.”

“Chuck..”

“It’s not weak, sir. You said so.”

_You’re not weak,_ is the mantra Speirs repeats in his ears every night. _It’s going to be okay. You’ll be okay._ He believes every word, even when caught in the throes of terror. He believes the steady voice, the even steadier hands, the warmth of the presence beside him. _Morning will come. Always does._

“I can’t.. I can’t fall apart.”

“I’ll put you back together,” he says, then, and doesn’t care about right or proper as he says it. He’s already survived one bullet to the head. It’s enough to make a man reckless like this. “I know where it all fits.”

“Do you?” Wry amusement tugs at Speirs’s lips. There’s a challenge in the words. “Figured me out, have you?”

“Yes.”

_You know me, too,_ he wants to say, now that Speirs’s breath seems to stutter and his dark eyes gleam with something he’s almost scared of. _You’ve put me back together when everyone else told you to stop holding all those pieces of me in your hands._

“What would you do?”

“Sir?”

“To.. help.”

He steps closer. Wraps one arm around the man’s chest until the tight shoulders lose their rigidity. Wraps his other hand around the base of Speirs’s neck, brushes past the longer strands of hair until his fingers come to rest close to his skin, and rubs circles of comfort into the space between hairs and collar. Lets his chin come to rest on his captain’s shoulder.

“Chuck..”

Speirs’s eyes don’t leave the moonlit treeline that’s barely visible through the window. He knows his captain never turns his back on doors and windows. Knows the man categorizes every room’s use by easy exits and minimal entrances. He knows the use of his name is the test of an exit, too. A way to offer a clear escape.

Chuck’s grasp tightens momentarily. He shifts from chin to cheek on the man’s shoulder. Presses close to his captain’s side until he feels the man soften beneath his touch, until Speirs’s hand comes to rest around the folds of his uniform, until he’s certain that his captain knows hurt will not follow a gentle touch.

“’s okay to need someone, sir.”

Speirs’s inhale is too sharp. He almost withdraws at the sound.

“Okay to want someone, too?”

The whisper hangs in the air between them. Sharp as a knife that twists and plunges steel into the parts of his belly that have gone aflutter at the words. More accurate in dealing damage than the bullet that wrecked him – and maybe this is what dying is, in the end, merely an attempt to keep your deepest longing together by holding whatever can hurt you most.

“Yeah,” he dares affirm, “that’s okay too.”

Chuck loosens his touch. Steps into the bleak moonlight in front of Speirs. Becomes the thing that shields him from entryways and exits. He knows this is what living is. He would place himself between pain and this man for the rest of his life, and suffer both gladly.

Speirs tilts his head in contemplation. There is something unreadable in his gaze – calm and ravenous all at once. Yet Chuck knows those eyes, even when they go dark as this. He doesn’t need to decipher this language. His insides are talking gibberish at the ghost of a smile that plays around his captain’s lips.

“It’s always been this way,” the man says, and it’s not a question. It’s never been a question. “We’ve always been here.”

Chuck used to like to play with fire. Used to love bonfire nights on beaches up and down the coast. Used to love the fizzle and pop of fireworks. A part of him, hidden deep in a frozen foxhole with snow rising all around him, loves all the parts where the world explodes. He likes being close to flame and fury.

Moth to flame, he offers the man his given name.

“Ron.”

He holds his left hand out. Ignores the fact that his fingers tremble as mild pain courses through his arm from wrist to shoulder. If he is to reach for this man at all, he will do it with the part of him that is as broken as his head feels. If he has any right to claim this, he will do so with the hand that shakes as much as his voice does.

A hand both familiar and warm tangles with his own. Fits fingers into the spaces between his own fingers and squeezes an anchor into his skin and bones. He is certain that the tremors that wreck his arm travel through the man’s body, merge with the perfect stillness that was always cultivated, come to a halt somewhere he can’t even see or begin to reach.

“Ron,” he says again, because he’s at that point where he can’t use another name and needs an anchor now that his words begin to crumble around the permission he is giving, “it’s okay.”

He tries to fortify his feeble speech with action. Knows half his limbs don’t work right, but steps closer and stumbles into arms that are already open to him. Chuck knows he’s broken. Knows he’s just dancing around his own piles of rubble and tripping over the air between the standing stones. There’s not a whole lot he can do to fix all the parts that don’t work right.

Yet, he knows this too. He knows the beat of his own heart. Knows how to want.

Chuck knows how to _live_.

So he sighs a kiss against lips he has memorized in curve and bow during the hot Georgian summer. Presses close until he can nudge affection against skin he’s only ever brushed against in passing, has only been close to during fights, has never had to himself like this. It’s the first time he’s not sharing this man with a war. The first moment he can just have, and let himself be had. He kisses Ron for the first time and feels all the foreign world inside him shift into familiarity.

And when Ron’s lips crash onto his own, it’s with the ferocity of waves crashing onto the shore. It’s an undertow, trembling and moving all at once, that tugs at his navel and coaxes him to bend to its will. He gasps for air between one kiss and the next. Yet, delighted laughter escapes his lungs more fiercely than oxygen. In enjoyment, in celebration, in all the things he wants that Ron wants too. If there’s hunger here, if he can taste it at all, he’s certain to call it desperation for the breaths shared between them. But oh, his feet are rooted in dirt – in clay, from which he has not grown wings – and yet he is flying – soaring – tumbling and falling.

Ron kisses him as though his is the last breath he will know before the water takes him. Chuck kisses back, he must, he aches, he pushes and pulls and demands with every touch of lips and tongue and teeth and hands. He kisses back as though he is moving up from the earth, rising to meet air for the first time in forever, reclaiming the breaths that were knocked from his lungs. He knows he is undertow and salvation all at once as every sharp inhale and shuddering exhale melts against his lips, against his skin, against his hair, until it presses down into the very bones of his existence.

The laughter, when it comes, soars. Takes flight as it flutters upward from his belly and meets the spiraling, surprised laughter of a man who’s forgotten how to live. He meets Ron halfway as though they are trailing Currahee, mapping out familiarity on skin and threading patterns of how to find one another in every life down between kisses, speaking in a language they’ve both perfected through having watched each other all these years.

_I am here,_ he speaks from kiss to kiss.

_I am here,_ is the response, slipped between their tongues so it can slide sweetly into his mouth.

He savors the taste. Savors the moment where control floods out of Ron’s limbs and they stumble back into supplies and ammunition and a wall that will not move for them. Drinks in the sound of spun-out abandon and decides to love him there. Decides to love just like this the same way he decided he would long ago when Ron had blinked at him in the dying daylight of a Toccoa day and told him to lead the way.

He laughs belonging against the man’s skin. Counts himself invincible. Believes himself whole.

In here, in the moonlight, in these arms, he is remade.


End file.
